In Which I Genuflect at the Feet of Poets

I have found another poem to love:

Two Months After

A clutch of rain against the windows.
All day this beaten house has been bearing up
under the March wind, a wind that aches
down the thick beams the carpenter cut

to take its weight. A mud-covered truck
drones up the hill, under a stone sky.
Spring will come only after the hard work
of the water is done, after the high

green leaves have shouldered their sparks
through the winter's ancient test.
Perhaps then the hard ice of your death

will have rotted away. In Schubert's songs
I listen for your listening, for the arch
of smoking notes your night-heart sang.

Jay Leeming

This is a play on the structure of Shakespearean sonnets. It starts out traditionally, with quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme. But then it diverges. There are two three-line stanzas that start to lift the despair expressed in the two quatrains. But the really interesting thing about this poem is the pattern of the types of rhymes. There are six pairs of half-rhymes--rhymes that sound similar but are not traditional perfect rhymes--and one pair that rhymes perfectly: "sky" and "high". If we look at the types of half-rhymes that make up the other pairs, a pattern emerges. The first half-rhyme is an example of consonance. The next is assonance, and then consonance, again. The perfect rhyme is in the middle, then the rhymes after the perfect rhyme mirror those before: consonance, assonance, consonance. This give the poem a feeling of hope--it may start out in the depths of despair, but this is mirrored by loving remembrance.
I am continually amazed by the complexity of poems--especially sonnets. There always seem to be greater depths to explore, and there are so many elements to fit together. I think that it might be time to let poets run the world... Anyone who can craft something with this much complexity of meaning must have something important to contribute. Probably.